Position in chronology
MDP 17, 197
About this tablet
A small, badly broken clay tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written a little over five thousand years ago in proto-Elamite — a script that grew up alongside the earliest cuneiform of Mesopotamia and has never been fully deciphered. What survives is bookkeeping: a handful of commodity or category signs, each followed by numerals of the proto-Elamite counting system, recording quantities issued or received. We can read the numbers but not the words, which is the ordinary condition of proto-Elamite accounting: the arithmetic is transparent, the vocabulary is not.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragment of an account. The first entry lists a commodity — the sign for it is still undeciphered — in the amount of two large units plus one small unit. The next line is broken away entirely. A third entry pairs several category signs with a single unit of the same commodity, and a fourth begins with more signs before the tablet breaks off; its quantity is lost. The last line preserves only traces of two signs. The reverse is worn smooth and tells us nothing further.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. M387~ef (commodity/category sign) — 2(N01) 1(N24) 2. [...] — [...] (numerals lost) 3. [...] |M131+M388| M263~a M218 — 1(N01) 4. M218 M219 M057~e [...] — [...] (numerals lost) 5. [... ...] — [...] (numerals lost) (The remainder of the surface, including the reverse, is abraded and carries no legible signs.)
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
M387~ef , 2(N01)# 1(N24)# x [...] , [...] [...] x |M131+M388| M263~a M218# , 1(N01) M218 M219 M057~e [...] , [...] x x , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 197. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008395) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.